What It's Like to Fly into a Hurricane

The sight of entire islands flattened in the wake of Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm currently pummeling the Caribbean, should be evidence enough that evacuating or, at the very least, seeking shelter and hunkering down are the most logical responses to 185-mile-per-hour winds. But for some, it's an opportunity to better understand these massive natural forces of destruction—and to do so, they need to get in a plane and fly straight into the storm.

The Hurricane Hunters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are a fleet of specially designed planes staffed by aerospace engineers, meteorologists, and highly trained pilots. The crews fly directly into hurricanes and, using state-of-the-art tools, transmit valuable data that help weather scientists predict a hurricane's track and be better prepared for future storms.

Two highly modified Lockheed P-3 Orion four-engine turboprop aircraft in the fleet, for example, go by the nicknames "Kermit" and "Miss Piggy" and embark on missions that can last up to ten hours, through the most destructive parts of the hurricane. Along the way, scientists deploy something called "dropwindsondes" out of the aircraft—small cylinders equipped with parachutes and GPS trackers that are able to measure temperature, pressure, winds, and humidity every half-second, without being totally obliterated. Something called a "Doppler radar" on the plane's tail simultaneously scans the storm from every direction, transmitting real-time information about the storm's patterns—namely, where it's heading and how fast it's going there.

It all makes for a rough ride, as evidenced by a tweeted video that went viral, shot by aerospace engineer Nick Underwood, who was sent into the eye of Hurricane Irma on a Monday night mission. In the video, the plane is battered by wind and rain as it passes through the hurricane's eye wall, the storm's most devastating section, before entering the relative calm of the eye in the storm's center.

If a hurricane like this can damage 95 percent of the property on the island of Barbuda, how is it not turning a prop-powered plane into a ball of twisted metal? As the NOAA makes clear on its website, "planes are generally not destroyed by strong winds while in flight." Instead, it's sudden changes in speed and direction of winds that can damage an aircraft—it's a reason we don't see tornado-hunting planes. In fact, while the Hurricane Hunters are manned by highly trained specialists, even commercial airliners withstand winds of more than 150 miles per hour—about the threshold for a Category 5 storm—which can occur in jet streams over the U.S. in the winter. As Wired reported, a Delta flight even managed to get in and out of San Juan, Puerto Rico as Hurricane Irma was skirting the island's coast on Wednesday. That being said, it takes a whole other kind of bravado to intentionally fly straight into a storm like this.

And, while the data gathered helps communities in a hurricane's path be better prepared, there's clearly an adrenaline rush that comes from being part of the Hurricane Hunters team, too. Just look at what Underwood tweeted following his mission, speaking of the selected soundtrack as the team headed into the eye wall: "So you can imagine me in an airplane getting tossed around in a major hurricane and just going HARD to DMX," he wrote. "I loved it."